How Jean-Baptiste Charcot came to embrace fear but not anger. Emotions of polar exploration and their communication to the public in the 1900s

Abstract

This article makes the case for applying recent developments in the history of emotions, and in particular the concept of “emotional arena”, to the study of past polar expeditions. It focuses on the first Antarctic expedition of Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1903–1905), showing how, despite a lack of ideal sources, attention to the role of emotions in his expedition, and in the way it was communicated to the public provides a new understanding of the culture of exploration of the time. The article pays particular attention to two groups of emotions: first, those related to fear, an emotion that Charcot initially was reluctant to say that he had experienced (his position changed under the influence of journalists who saw the emotion as an interesting selling point); and second, anger and hate, emotions that were deemed inappropriate and were omitted from hidden in published accounts of the expedition, even though they appear in other sources.

Introduction

“What should the psychologist look for in the handwriting of a man who comes back from the Antarctic seas? The intelligence to conceive, the audacity to undertake, the tenacious energy to accomplish, the cautiousness to avoid the perils. All of this is to be found in the handwriting of Jean Charcot.”

This sentence introduced graphologist Albert de Rochetal’s 1907 article dedicated to the analysis of the handwriting of Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1867–1936), a man famous for having led an Antarctic expedition (1903–1905) – and soon to lead a second one (1908–1910) – and for being the son of the internationally famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (in this article, “Charcot” refers to the son). De Rochetal, on the basis of a handwriting sample, deemed Charcot to be, among other things, of an “impressionable, vibrant and impassioned” nature but also prone to short bouts of depression. Charcot himself had some faith in the use of graphology to analyse personalities. He sent a clipping of Rochetal’s article to his soon-to-be wife, noting that although it contained “maybe a few inaccuracies,” he liked de Rochetal’s conclusion: “superior handwriting, superior character, profoundly friendly” (Letter from Charcot to Marguerite Cléry, June 1907, private archives of the Charcot family).

Rochetal’s article shows that there was an interest in what went on in the minds of polar explorers: their character, and their susceptibility to different emotions. The idea of character as something positive was central to British Victorian culture (Jones, 2003, pp. 25–28). In France, the word was often used as well but not necessarily in a positive way: one could have a good or a bad character, and it was usually seen as something permanent, or even innate, that events could reveal in a person. In France as in the UK, polar exploration was seen as such a revealer of the character of the explorers, and this discourse centred often on the emotions experienced, or supposedly experienced, while in the polar regions. This is what I endeavour to analyse in this article, by focusing on Charcot’s first Antarctic expedition.

Charcot himself introduced the book that he published about this expedition by claiming, “I thought that the public would be thankful if I should let it live thus almost day by day the adventures of our struggle in Antarctica, and to have it participate in the emotions of our work and of our discoveries” (Charcot, 1906, p. I, my emphasis). Such claims of wanting to share the emotions of polar exploration with one’s audiences were not exceptional, yet their meaning and implications have not yet been studied fully. These claims deserve the attention of polar historians because they are misleading: Charcot did not really try to share with the public the actual emotions he experienced in Antarctica. What he offered was one version of events, adapted for publication. That an explorer, or his editor, or the journalists presenting an expedition would find it in their interest to transform the story for publication is not at all surprising and is already well-studied (Cavell, 2008; Craciun, 2016; Kaalund, 2021; Keighren, Withers, & Bell, 2015; MacLaren, 1994, 2011). This is still true in recent times: Meredith Nash, Elizabeth Leane and Kimberley Norris show how media discourse on Antarctic expeditioners during the COVID-19 pandemic was centred on ideas of individual heroism, while in fact it was group dynamics that determined how well people coped (Nash, Leane, & Norris, 2022).

Emotions were an important aspect of these differences between the field and the published account, but very few historians have paid attention to them, leading to a gap in our understanding of the culture of exploration in general and polar exploration in particular. Several books and articles have focused on the centrality of polar explorers as heroic figures of masculinity (Bloom, 1993; Cronin, 2013; Jones, 2003; Lewis Jones, 2017; Robinson, 2015); however, they have either neglected the emotional aspects or have left them implicit and unproblematised. In the words of emotions historian Barbara Rosenwein, these studies are thus examples of “unfocused historical emotions talk”, which is problematic, she argues, because a failure to recognise the historicity of emotions risks producing anachronistic history (Rosenwein, 2006).

A study of the emotions of polar exploration can lean on broader studies in the history of emotions, which has blossomed as a field in the last two decades with the creation of dedicated research centres, a journal, and the publication of both voluminous collective syntheses (Barclay & Stearns, 2022; Broomhall, Davidson, & Lynch, 2019) and many introductions to the field and other textbooks (Barclay, 2020; Barclay, Crozier-De Rosa, & Stearns, 2021; Boddice, 2018; Corbin, Courtine, & Vigarello, 2016; Matt & Stearns, 2014; Plamper, 2017; Rosenwein & Cristiani, 2018). Many different concepts have been proposed to better understand the role of emotions in past societies (Barclay, 2021). Most useful for this case is “emotional arenas”, proposed by Marc Seymour, which “denotes contemporaneously existing but defined social spaces, where the experience and expression of emotions, and their staging and shaping, are likely to follow patterns distinctive to that space” (Seymour, 2020, p. 12). This concept therefore focuses on the spatial dimensions of emotions, making it useful for studying all historical actors since everyone typically moves and interacts with others in different spaces. It is, however, particularly the case for explorers, whose function it is to travel to other places. In the case of Charcot’s expeditions, these spaces and potentially different emotional arenas include, for instance, the expedition ship and the area of Antarctica where they overwintered.

Yet what happened in Antarctica did not stay in Antarctica: it was told, and judged, back home in France when the expedition returned – that is to say, in different emotional arenas from the ones in the field. Emotions that might have been seen as acceptable or inappropriate in the field were not necessarily the same as those in the metropole where the story was presented. Johannes Fabian shows in his 2000 book Out of Our Minds how European ethnographers in central Africa were not nearly as rational in their thinking as they presented themselves to be and that they were guided at least as much by their emotions as by reason (Fabian, 2000). If one reads it through the lens of Seymour’s concept of emotional arenas, Fabian’s book shows how the telling in one emotional arena (European scientific associations and publications) about one’s emotions experienced in another arena (central Africa) was a translation. Emotions of exploration were, necessarily, narrated, and as Joanna Bourke argues, “The act of narrating emotions – to oneself as much as to others – is dependent upon the ordering mechanisms of grammar, plot and genre. To the extent that these mechanisms are historical, the way emotions are experienced have a history” (Bourke, 2006, pp. 288–289).

Since Fabian’s book, very little has been published on the subject of emotions and exploration, and even less on the emotions of polar exploration (Festa, 2006; Gibbard, 2018). The emotional aspects of the travel accounts of polar explorers were rather well known: they were underlined for instance by Paul Simpson-Housley in his 1992 Antarctica. Exploration, perception and metaphor (Simpson-Housley, 1992). But very few historians have looked at them anew, with perspectives enriched from the more recent historiography of emotions. An important exception is Carolyn Strange’s 2012 article showing that cheerfulness was a central aspect of the experience of the participants in the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1913 (Strange, 2012). Another is a 2016 article on Christmas at the Poles by Shane McCorristine and Jane Mocellin: they argue convincingly that celebrating Christmas on polar expeditions “simultaneously reminded individuals of their private home lives while enabling them to bond in a group during a time when good fellowship and positive emotions were considered normative” (McCorristine & Mocellin, 2016, p. 564).

Both Strange on the one hand, and McCorristine and Mocellin on the other hand, write their articles based on the books published by the explorers. However, assessing the relation of these publications to the emotions actually experienced in the Antarctic remains a complicated question – as Strange acknowledges, “Re-reading polar memoirs for evidence of cheerfulness does not imply that they mirrored experience” (Strange, 2012, p. 79). Strange argues that the congruence of the published diaries she analyses on the question of cheerfulness is an indicator that this was how the explorers actually felt in the field (Strange, 2012, p. 69). While I agree with this argument, the question of the distortions induced by the publication of these emotional discourses is worth analysing more in-depth – this congruence may also be an effect of the genre of the travel narrative. In order to understand this, looking at the common points between published diaries is not enough. Therefore, I focus on the discrepancies between the different published stories of Charcot’s first expedition. I show that in the process of publicly narrating the emotions of this expedition, some emotions were emphasised while others were concealed, regardless of their actual importance in the field. I focus in the following analysis on fear and anger. I do not claim that these were the defining emotions for this expedition, and a fuller study would need to also put forward the positive emotions experienced by the explorers: as Carolyn Strange puts it, the historiography of emotions should “loosen its attachment to negative emotions” (Strange, 2012, p. 80). I nevertheless focus on the discourses on fear and anger because these differed much more from one version to the next than those about positive emotions and are therefore better suited to highlighting the distortions of publication better than the discourses about positive emotions.

Ideally, it would be useful to compare what was published with expedition members’ own accounts of their time in the polar regions, written in the field. I have unfortunately not been able to locate Charcot’s journal from his Antarctic travels, despite searches in public and private archives. Charcot’s case is therefore not an ideal one to study: there are far fewer sources on his expeditions than exist for other explorers. This study relies on the analysis of the media coverage of his expeditions, which is compared with his own published writings, and with the journal of Raymond Rallier du Baty, a member of his first expedition. The first half of Rallier du Baty’s field notes were rediscovered on a ship he had sold and were published in the 1940s, 40 years after the return of the expedition (Rallier du Baty, 1946). Unfortunately, the original manuscript of Rallier’s journal seems to have disappeared as well, and only published versions remain.

I will analyse, first, the diverging discourses on whether or not Charcot experienced fear in Antarctica, showing that the emotions of explorers were a central preoccupation both of the explorer himself and of the journalists who wrote about the expedition – and presumably, something that interested the readers of the expedition’s book and the newspaper reports. Reference to fear was desirable in an expedition account. Second, I will address the question of anger on the expedition and show that this emotion, in contrast to fear, was deemed inappropriate and thus repressed in Charcot’s book, regardless of the realities in the field.

Charcot’s fear or lack thereof: emotions of exploration and the media

In this first part of the article, I address the question of Charcot’s fear and show that although he was initially reluctant to present fear as an important part of the expedition, he later changed his mind.

Fear was among the first emotions studied by historians. A pioneer was Georges Lefebvre, who in his book on the Grande Peur (Great Fear) of 1789, first published in 1932, tried to “put himself among those who had felt it” (Lefebvre, 1970, p. 3). The Grande Peur, caused by rumours of brigands and leading to revolts against the lords who were supposedly inactive against this menace or even using it to their advantage, was a collective phenomenon but a particular event. Jean Delumeau, in his 1978 book on fear in the Western world between 1348 and 1800, broadened the scope, demonstrating in particular that it was then a stereotype to say that the poor were more easily afraid (Delumeau, 1978). Delumeau considered fear as natural but also influenced by culture: “Refined as we are by a long cultural past, are we not today more fragile in the face of danger and more permeable to fear than our ancestors?” (Delumeau, 1978, p. 8). In his recent book on fear in Belle Epoque France, Arnaud-Dominique Houte follows in Delumeau’s tracks instead of leaning on the more recent historiography of emotions. He shows how the 1890s and 1900s (i.e. the same period as Charcot’s expedition), while in many ways a particularly secure time for the French, were also a period characterised by many fears. Fears of crime, degeneration, revolutions and crowds in general, of anarchist bombings, of many frightening illnesses such as tuberculosis, or even of newfound contraptions like the automobiles that started to speed through the streets, frightening the people and the horses, were circulated and reinforced by the press, then in its golden age (Houte, 2022).

Lefebvre, Delumeau and Houte focus largely on collective fears, fears that are shared among a large part of society, even if the individuals do not necessarily experience them at the same time in Delumeau’s and Houte’s books. As Delumeau explains, this entails using the term “fear” to describe a broad range of emotions, an approach that I will use here as well. As Joanna Bourke puts it, “Was what people in the 1970s called ‘fear’ the same thing as it was in the 1870s? Probably not” (Bourke, 2003, p. 114). This difficulty is compounded by the translation from French to English: at least two French words, crainte and peur, are commonly translated as “fear”, although peur usually indicates a stronger fear than crainte. This makes the study difficult. In fact, the meanings of “emotion”, “feeling” and other comparable words have also evolved (Dixon, 2003; Leys, 2017). I use “fear” here to describe a variety of emotions described in the French sources on the expedition as peur or crainte, but also inquiétude, as well as expressions like broyer du noir when the context indicates that they refer to worry or anxiety.

Bourke focuses on fear as an emotion, whereas Lefebvre, Delumeau and Houte study instead what could elicit fear and how these fears could spread. As such, the latter study fear as a cultural phenomenon rather than as an emotion per se, in contrast to the approach of the historians of emotions. In addition to Bourke’s article and book on fear published in the 2000s (Bourke, 2003, 2006), two collective volumes published in the 2010s have addressed fear through the prism of the history of emotions (Laffan & Weiss, 2012; Plamper & Lazier, 2012). In one of these books, Jan Plamper shows how there was no discussion about the fear felt by Russian soldiers in 1812, whereas the topic had become central a hundred years later: “Either soldiers at some point began to experience more fear, or the boundaries of what could be and actually was said about soldierly fear in personal documents profoundly shifted or a new and real experience of fear came together with a discursive shift” (Plamper, 2012, p. 79). A similar process interests me here, but over a shorter period: in just a few months, Charcot went from downplaying fear experienced on the expedition to discussing it in his book.

Two approaches to fear

This change happened in less than a year and seems to have been the result of a lukewarm reception of Charcot’s preliminary expedition account in the press and especially in one newspaper, Le Matin. This was particularly problematic because Le Matin had largely financed the expedition. It did so somewhat inadvertently: the newspaper advanced Charcot a large sum, which he needed to launch his expedition. The paper expected this sum to be reimbursed through a public subscription, which proved to be disappointing. The expedition therefore cost Le Matin much more than editor-in-chief Stéphane Lauzanne had anticipated. His hopes of recouping this cost rested on the potential for better sales as a result of exclusive content to be published in the paper: Charcot would be sending him not only news from South America on the return of the expedition but also his journal.

Charcot did send a journal from South America to Le Matin, which published parts of it. But it was another disappointment for Lauzanne, who did not bother hiding how boring he found Charcot’s text. Parts of it were not printed in the newspaper because, as he explicitly informed readers, he deemed them too technical (Lauzanne, 1905a). Lauzanne was even clearer a few months later when Charcot returned in person to France. Lauzanne complained, “I must tell Charcot that I blame him a bit for having hidden from us the dramatic adventures of his voyage: reading his journal, that Le Matin has published, it seems that it is not much more terrible to go to the South Pole than to go down the Seine in a small boat. This man, with the handful of brave people who accompanied him, has however known the most frightful and diverse dangers; he has felt, at certain times, weighing on his soul and on his heart the heavy horrors of death” (Lauzanne, 1905b). Lauzanne had clearly been hoping for dramatic accounts of fearful events, while what he initially got from Charcot was a downplaying of the dangers of the expedition to better highlight the professionalism of its members: e.g. “Since one gets used to everything, even to considering placidly the most imminent dangers, while our ship huffs and gasps, we take care of the cartography of the unknown and unwelcoming coast on which we could not land” (Charcot, 1905).

Charcot was here referring to what was probably the worst moment of the whole expedition: the stranding of his ship, the Français, at the end of the expedition. The ship was damaged so severely that the crew had to work the pumps continuously all the way to South America to prevent it from sinking – an objectively quite worrisome prospect. On the one hand, Lauzanne painted a terrifying picture of heroes overcoming terribly frightening situations despite experiencing much fear. On the other hand, Charcot presented himself and his crew as so professional that they kept on with their scientific work even in the expedition’s most critical moments; he presented the fear as only one aspect of the experience, and it was an aspect he downplayed in favour of the scientific work.

This was one dimension of a recurring debate around the turn of the 20th century: Were polar explorers scientists or were they athletes performing entertaining feats? Several historians have looked at this question (Riffenburgh, 1993; Roberts, 2004; Robinson, 2006). The answer was usually both: scientific research gave their ventures legitimacy, while the “feats” aspect of the race to the poles made for a broader audience through the newspapers. Michael Robinson shows how in the United States, around the time of Charcot’s expedition, polar explorers had largely divested themselves from science (Robinson, 2006). While the situation was not as clear-cut in France, much of the representations of polar exploration focused on its athletic aspects and fit well with broader discourses about sport as a way to fight the “degeneration” of the “French race” much feared since the defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 (Rauch, 2015, pp. 288–296). Such fears of degeneration were not solely French, and Max Jones shows that in the UK as well, polar exploration was used as a way to demonstrate that a nation was not in decline (Jones, 2003, pp. 195–199).

Charcot himself was an accomplished sportsman, a fencer and a rugby player. But he was also a medical doctor who had worked at the Institut Pasteur: he saw himself as a scientist and insisted on the scientific seriousness of his expedition. This was an advantage when it came to finding support among scientific associations, but it was not adequate for other audiences. In commercial and literary terms, Charcot had misunderstood the genre of text that was expected of him: he wrote for Le Matin a text that was more appropriate for scientific societies than for a newspaper selling over a million copies daily, and Lauzanne did not hesitate to publicly reproach him for it.

Fear on Charcot’s first expedition

Charcot seems to have learned from this: his book, published the following year, included more open discussions of his experience of fear. The same stranding incident, for instance, was described this time in a rather different way: “The men asleep under the deck come up on the deck half dressed, there is a moment of stupor, of intense emotion, but without panic, and I see all the eyes turning towards me. Was I afraid? I don’t know, maybe after all since I wondered about it and that, very calm, very much in control of myself in any case, I straightened my cap and buttoned up my jacket to strike a pose and give myself countenance” (Charcot, 1906, p. 303).

Charcot was still not admitting explicitly that he had been afraid, but he was recognising that the event had an emotional effect on him. He used the occasion to insist on his leadership skills, and his mastery of his own emotions, at least in the appearance he gave to his men. I will discuss the relationship between emotions and leadership in the second part of this article. For now, I wish to use the available sources to try to understand whether Charcot was hiding his fears in his published writings, or if there simply had not been much to worry about in the field. Without access to his notes written in the Antarctic, it is hard to say what changed between Charcot’s actual impressions and what he published; furthermore, it is not possible to say whether his account in Le Matin or the one in his book was closer to his actual experience.

In the absence of ideal sources, I am limited to a comparison with the surviving journal of Rallier du Baty, which does not cover the moment when the ship ran aground; it only covers the first half of the expedition. But his coverage of fear overall is not very different from Charcot’s. Rallier mentions, for instance, “the tension owed to great dangers” but not fear (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 70). Both men, then, tended to downplay the fear of being in immediate danger. However, they discussed more long-term fears.

The first of these long-term fears was that of not coming back, of dying in Antarctica. The two men gave comparable presentations of this, and both mentioned that their fear grew especially when they thought of their family members in France. It got worse when Charcot used the ship’s gramophone to play recordings of his family members. He noted that it had a negative effect not only on him but also on the crew, even though they did not know his family (Charcot, 1906, p. 288). Rallier similarly wrote, after recounting how the crew had laughed when discussing the idea that their relatives in France were probably very worried about them even though they were comfortable, “My God, will I ever see my family again?” (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 105).

The second of these long-term fears was expressed especially by Charcot and concerned the fear for others on the ship. Even in his published book, Charcot was never very explicit about his fear for himself. Where Lauzanne claimed that all the expedition’s participants had feared for their health and safety, Charcot was more willing to admit that he felt fear when it came to the safety of others. In particular, he described in the book how he could not sleep when the second-in-command of the expedition fell sick (Charcot, 1906, pp. 180–181).

In both cases, it is the fear of losing someone – either a member of the expedition or one’s whole family, by dying in Antarctica – that is central. In both cases, while neither man spoke of fear while in action, both wrote of worries that were long term and developed when they had time to think of their family in France. Here the written word reaches its limits, even when produced in the field, as in Rallier’s journal; it is not a direct testimony of the emotions experienced outside the moment of writing itself. Rallier never wrote, obviously, when in danger. He wrote later, when he had spare time, and therefore when he had been able to digest the day’s events and his impressions.

Fear in the genre of polar expedition writing in the early 1900s

I wish to broaden the scope for a moment to consider Charcot’s book as part of the genre of the polar expedition account and to place his book in the context of the preceding and following expedition books. This will allow us to situate Charcot’s and Lauzanne’s expectations in a broader context: Was Lauzanne wrong to expect Charcot to put forward his fears, or was it a normal expectation of a polar explorer?

First, it must be noted that the genre of the travel account was intimately connected to fictional travel accounts (Weber, 2004). In terms of polar exploration, the most notable French fictional account was Jules Verne’s Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, published in book form in 1867, the year of Charcot’s birth. The book tells the story of an explorer reaching the North Pole. It seems to have been widely read by polar explorers: Hatteras is mentioned not only in Charcot’s book and Rallier du Baty’s journal but also by Ernest Shackleton (Charcot, 1906, p. 137; Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 67; Riffenburgh, 2004, p. 28). In Verne’s book, only secondary characters admit fear, while the main ones reassure them (Verne, 1867, pp. 79–81, 444).

The discourses around fear were comparable in the two books about Antarctic exploration published in the years before the launch of Charcot’s expedition: Carsten Borchgrevink, in First on the Antarctic Continent, referred to fear only to say that his men, recruited among Norwegian sealers, did “not know the meaning of the word ‘fear’ ” (Borchgrevink, 1901, p. 22). Adrien de Gerlache similarly wrote of his men on his Antarctic expedition that they were “brave and without fear in facing death” (Gerlache, 1902, p. 214). Charcot’s initial approach was therefore in keeping with the preceding accounts of Antarctic expeditions.

After Borchgrevink and de Gerlache, several other expeditions visited Antarctica between 1901 and 1904. These expeditions returned and books about them were published while Charcot was in Antarctica, meaning that they could not have influenced his experience there, but that he could read them before publishing his own book. This is the case with Robert Falcon Scott’s account of the Discovery expedition, in which one can find a few remarks such as “I fear, I much fear, that things are going badly for us” (Scott, 1905b, p. 249). As Edward Armson-Sheret shows, scurvy in particular was dreaded by Scott, who discussed the issue quite openly in his book (Armston-Sheret, 2019). Charcot particularly admired Scott, with whom he later collaborated in developing motor sledges; Scott supposedly called Charcot the “polar gentleman” (Emmanuel, 1945). Charcot was fluent in English and, while it is doubtful that he read Scott’s book before sending his story to Le Matin, he probably did so before publishing his own book. He might also have read Otto Nordenskjöld’s Antarctica: or, Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole, which came out in an English translation in 1905. Here as well, there were a few admissions of fear: for instance, crevasses were “the things of which we had the greatest fear”. However, there were also claims of being able to resist fear – “No one complained, no one showed any signs of fear” – and open discussions of long-term anxieties: “when the fear of being confined here for another year was changed into a certainty, this, in its turn, bred complete mistrust in the future” (Nordenskjöld, 1977, pp. 211, 271, 284).

Expedition accounts were a transnational genre, and comments on fear were a part of it. Charcot’s published book was in keeping with the style of the accounts of the other Antarctic expeditions of the early 1900s: he discussed his fear of immediate dangers a bit less than Scott and Nordenskjöld, but there is probably a distinction to be made between the actual experience of explorers like Scott, who went on long treks to try to reach the South Pole, or Nordenskjöld, whose expedition was stranded in Antarctica, and others like Charcot who “only” remained close to their ship.

Charcot returned to Antarctica in 1908–1910 on another ship, named Pourquoi-Pas?, leading to another book. This time, Charcot was much more willing to discuss his fear, although he still favoured mentions of his fear for others over any fear for himself. The trends visible in his first book – downplaying the fears experienced in moments of danger but discussing the longer-term worries about not returning – were reinforced in the following one. Several sentences in the second book show this focus on the long term: “I am worried, very worried even, for our future”; “now I am assailed by the darkest thoughts […] We must nevertheless continue our struggle, sail for days and days, to risk maybe enduring years of worries and incertitude” (Charcot, 1910, pp. 235, 310). The distance between these fears and the moments of immediate danger is exemplified by a passage in which Charcot noted that what he found particularly worrying was an invoice for coal, which revealed how precarious his budget was (Charcot, 1910, p. 114). He explained how he consciously hid his worries from the crew, to avoid spreading the fear (Charcot, 1910, p. 130). Generally, he was more open to discussing different degrees of worry in his second book than in his first, but, as in this case, he often transformed these descriptions of discussions of fear into implicit claims of good leadership. As I will show in the second part of this article, this was also the case when discussing anger.

Charcot’s presentation of the fears experienced on the first expedition therefore changed between his return to South America and the publication of his book, and these changes were reinforced several years later in his second book. None of these changes tells us much about the emotions that Charcot actually experienced on the ice. Yet they tell a lot about the context in which polar exploration was mediatised: even explorers who wanted to focus on the scientific aspects of their work, like Charcot, had to take into account the expectations of the press, and their stories were written in the context of an international literary genre. Was Charcot afraid in Antarctica? In the absence of testimonies written by Charcot himself in the field, a definitive answer is not possible, but it does not necessarily matter: it is relevant enough for the historian that the question was asked and that the diverging answers reveal a great deal about the context of polar exploration.

Despite his claim, then, Charcot did not actually try to have the public “participate in the emotions of our work and of our discoveries” (Charcot, 1906, p. I), at least not in the actual emotions experienced. Fear, which does not seem to have characterised the expedition, was put forward in the press, and by Charcot himself, somewhat reluctantly at first. In contrast, other emotions experienced on the ship and in Antarctica were left out when the expedition was transformed into print. This is especially the case concerning anger and hatred. I turn to these emotions now.

Anger and hate: inappropriate polar emotions and their management

While admissions of fear were well received because they made a story compelling, anger was an inappropriate emotion on a narrated polar expedition. Robert Falcon Scott, in The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’, used “anger” or “angry” mostly to describe the behaviour of animals encountered, not that of the members of the expedition (Scott, 1905b, 1905a). Obviously, no one would believe that there was never a moment of something resembling anger among individuals living together for many months in an environment that could be unwelcoming. However, it was usually omitted in the speeches and books. Charcot described very few moments of anger in his book published in 1906 and summed things up as follows: “If the friendly discussions are frequent, the quarrels on the other hand are rare and the following grudges are short-lived” (Charcot, 1906, p. 172).

Comparison with the journal of Raymond Rallier du Baty shows this claim to be partly false, as one would expect. Rallier recorded on 29 September 1903, for instance, that he had an argument with a sailor, though it did not seem to have long-term consequences (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 38). This fits with Charcot’s summary. What does not is Rallier writing that “I have acquired the certainty that Z… [censored by the publisher] harboured a violent hatred against me since the day I told him what he really was: a snitch and a good-for-nothing” (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 116). Clearly, there was more anger on the expedition than Charcot wanted to admit, and it had consequences.

Anger, like fear and love, has particularly interested historians of the emotions (Dixon, 2020; Messner, 2022; Rosenwein, 2020a, 2020b). In one of the seminal books in the field, Peter and Carol Stearns studied the place of anger in the United States. They argued that the period between 1860 and 1940 was characterised by a turn to a relatively ambivalent approach to anger. While previously the ideal in American child-rearing advice books had been to avoid anger altogether, something considered possible, now some books of this sort recognised anger as natural in children, especially boys, and advised ways to control it rather than suppress it. Moreover, anger was considered to be a potentially useful emotion, if channelled and used to bolster competitiveness towards achievements, although this view did not completely replace older viewpoints that recommended its suppression (Stearns & Stearns, 1986, pp. 69–109). While a comparable study about France has not yet been written, the sources available regarding Charcot’s first expedition show a similar ambivalence.

Here as well, starting from a rigid definition is not as fruitful as studying how the historical actors used various terms to discuss emotions comparable to what we would call anger, as Thomas Dixon points out: “When it comes to ‘anger’, there is no ‘it’. There is no discrete thing, entity or process in the world, past or present, to which the English word ‘anger’ invariably refers” (Dixon, 2020, p. 3). Anger, Dixon argues, is not an emotion, and he calls for keeping in mind that changes in vocabulary are also changes in experiences. I will therefore use the term in a broad sense, paying attention to the tensions that characterised the Antarctic expedition and in what words they were described by their actors – with the caveat that we lack access to Charcot’s writings from the field. As Dixon puts it, I look at “anger-like, emotion-like” experiences (Dixon, 2020, p. 29).

Anger, body and space

I have already shown how journalists like Lauzanne tried to read the emotions of explorers in the field without having been there themselves. But likewise, members of the expedition endeavoured to read the emotions of other participants: it is necessary for adapting one’s behaviour. Reading others’ emotions can be done through language, but it is most often done by observing another’s behaviour and body language. This is why Monique Scheer has proposed we view emotions as a form of embodied practice (Scheer, 2012). Painters and theatre actors, for instance, work on what emotions should look like in order to be better understood. Explorers did not make such efforts, but they did rely on the physicality of emotions to understand what their comrades thought and felt. Rallier du Baty’s journal includes several such attempted readings of others’ emotions. He based his assumptions on physical signs, although in his journal he often only recorded the result of his reading rather than the process. He tried especially to read Charcot: he wrote, “Charcot looks sombre”, “he seems overexcited”, “he seemed very unhappy”, without explaining how he had come to these conclusions (Rallier du Baty, 1946, pp. 42–43, 44–45, 96). He was a bit more precise at other times. He wrote, for instance, that he could hear rage and irony in the expedition leader’s voice at one point, or that he saw him wipe away a tear (Rallier du Baty, 1946, pp. 42–43, 44–45).

The physicality of the emotions in the body is accompanied by a physicality in space, with particular emotional arenas allowing for the expression of emotions with varying degrees of freedom. Charcot explained in his book that he had “a great affection” for his cabin and would lock himself up in it to “rage against what I consider as injustice, sometimes from my fellow men, sometimes from nature” (Charcot, 1906, p. 120). Very few on the expedition had this luxury of having a place to be angry in peace. Rallier du Baty was envious of Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram, which was built to give more privacy than usual to the crew; Rallier noted that Charcot’s Francais was not as well conceived (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 38).

Michel Foucault famously described the ship, by its mobile nature, as “l’hétérotopie par excellence” (Foucault, 1984). Heterotopias are, he argued, actual places that are imbued with characteristics usually associated with utopias and consequently are different from what surrounds them. Foucault does not give an emotional dimension to his heterotopias, and Seymour does not integrate Foucault’s perspective into his own concept of emotional arenas. Nevertheless, the concept benefits from such a reflection. Foucault’s heterotopias can be seen as particular examples of Seymour’s emotional arenas: the rules were different, including when it came to which emotions were valued or inappropriate. Even inside the ship, there were differences between l’arrière, where the officers met and slept, and l’avant, for the rest of the crew. Such a division was standard on ships, and it also existed in the huts that other expeditions built to live in when they did not overwinter on their ships (Maddison, 2017, pp. 174–177). There were therefore different emotional arenas on an expedition – at least three. In the avant and the arrière, the separation of officers and men allowed them a bit more freedom. The third emotional arena encompassed all other spaces on the ship as well as onshore where the two groups interacted and therefore had to hold their roles more strongly.

As a rather small enclosed space, the ship was both a protection from the outside environment and a space where many people lived in close proximity for long periods of time, as Rallier du Baty noted (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 87). This space was expanded upon arrival at the expedition’s overwintering spot. Rallier recorded his satisfaction when, after the ship had arrived, its deck was freed of the construction elements meant for buildings onshore, along with the various animals (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 86). The areas surrounding the ship and the buildings installed by the expedition were symbolically integrated by being named, as was common on other expeditions (Lindsay & Yoon, 2021). The “avenue Victor Hugo”, from the ship to the buildings onshore, was named after the French republican poet and grandfather of Charcot’s then-wife, Jeanne. A summit was named after her, while the bay where they overwintered was named “Port-Charcot” after the expedition leader’s father (Charcot, 1906, pp. 69–101). Obviously, Charcot himself chose these names, providing him with a stronger symbolic appropriation of the area than the rest of the expedition’s participants.

The expedition’s various members left the ship when collecting scientific specimens or taking measurements and when participating in the different activities arranged to maintain morale, such as sports competitions on the ice and hunts (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 64). However, this expansion of the expedition’s space did not necessarily mean more personal freedom: because of the environmental dangers, Charcot forbade the men from venturing farther out alone. Yet he did not respect this restriction himself: he once left the ship in a fit of rage and walked alone on the ice pack, endangering not only himself but the others should they have needed to go rescue him (Charcot, 1906, pp. 168, 255).

Anger and hierarchy

Although Charcot claimed that anger had not played a part in the expedition, he nevertheless included several stories in which his own anger was central. One of these was when he slapped his butler, Robert Paumelle, who had been complaining that Charcot was in a bad mood; according to Charcot, Paumelle later recognised that the slap was deserved, although the sincerity of this is of course impossible to ascertain (Charcot, 1906, pp. 31–32). Charcot used Paumelle as a sort of comic relief at several points in the book, for instance, saying that the butler was always angry at various objects. Charcot hung a quote from Montaigne about the uselessness of getting angry at inanimate objects above Paumelle’s bed – to which Paumelle replied, according to Charcot, that Montaigne had clearly never sailed in Antarctica (Charcot, 1906, p. 130). Charcot’s slapping and one-sided pranking of the butler are reminders of the hierarchies onboard: Paumelle was not in a position that allowed him to be angry at his boss, as the slap reminded him, but venting his anger on objects instead only led to mockery.

Hierarchy was given on any ship: the seamen working on the expedition would be taking orders from someone else if not Charcot. This hierarchy was strict, and people were used to it. During the British Discovery expedition for instance, the cook, whom Scott described as a “thorough knave” and “dirty”, was put in irons for insubordination (Scott, 1905a, p. 248; Wilson, 1975, p. 113). But Charcot was no navy or even merchant captain; he was a civilian, whose ship experience came from yachting. Tensions that might have arisen from this were limited by the fact that he used the same boatswain as he had done for more than a decade for his yachting travels, who was in effect an intermediary between the culture of yachting and that of the merchant navy from which came most of the expedition’s men. A limit to this successful integration of Charcot’s yachting culture with that of his crew was the question of alcohol: Charcot forbade his sailors from drinking and lectured regularly in the evenings on the damages of alcohol. He noted in his book his disappointment when he realised that they had been discussing behind his back how they all longed to get drunk once they returned to South America (Charcot, 1906, pp. 271–272).

The hierarchy on the ship and by extension the expedition was, at its simplest, an opposition between the crew and the officers, l’avant and l’arrière. For Rallier du Baty, who was from a family of officers but who embarked as a simple seaman, this was a given. But he recorded in his journal his anger at someone who did not fit in this hierarchy: Paul Pleneau, an engineer who was on the expedition because of his friendship with Charcot. Pleneau was far from useless: his technical knowledge proved useful several times, and both Charcot and Rallier noted how his good humour and constant jokes had a positive effect on the crew’s morale. This mirrors Carolyn Strange’s point about the later British Antarctic Expedition: for these Frenchmen, as for the British, a cheerful man was highly valued on such an expedition (Strange, 2012). However, Pleneau did not have a clear status; he was lodged and sat with the officers and the scientists but without being clearly in charge of the crew. Rallier du Baty vented his anger in his journal after Pleneau had sounded off at him and another seaman who were taking a break, writing of Charcot’s engineer friend that “this clumsy boy forgets that he is only a passenger on the Français; I estimate that he lacks tact when he allows himself to make blessing remarks […] to men who are not under his command in any way” (Rallier du Baty, 1946, pp. 105–106).

The strict hierarchy onboard restricted the expression of anger: it could come down from the officers to the crew, but not in the other direction. Charcot could even get (briefly) violent with his butler, but the opposite was not true. People like Pleneau, without a clear position, upset this hierarchy. Rallier du Baty could express his anger in his journal but not to Pleneau’s face, and his anger was reinforced by the fact that he did not recognise Pleneau as his superior and therefore felt that his expressing anger at the crew was inappropriate.

Anger and the role of a leader

Thus, there was anger on Charcot’s expedition, and its expression was framed by the social differences among the participants. Yet this was not present in Charcot’s book – and this concealment was not an exception. Ben Maddison, writing about the various expeditions of the Antarctic “Heroic Age”, from the late 1890s to the Great War, explains, “Although official account after official account repeatedly maintains that harmonious relationship existed between ‘officers’ and ‘men’ on Antarctic expeditions, this cannot be taken as proof that this was the case” (Maddison, 2017, p. 189). Charcot’s first Antarctic expedition was thus typical: after its return to France in 1905, there were celebrations of its “harmonious” character comparable to what Maddison describes. Charcot was the object of many feasts and receptions. At one of these, at the Société de Géographie de Paris, the president of the association, Le Myre de Vilers, concluded his speech about the expedition by saying, “I want to record that the greatest harmony has reigned for two years on the Français; officers, scientists, sailors, have remained in a complete community of ideas and this reciprocal confidence between all the members of the mission has been instrumental in the success of the mission; it does the greatest honour to M. Charcot” (Lemoine, 1905, p. 74). I have already shown how, even with the limited sources available, one can indeed identify tensions on Charcot’s expedition between the working class and the officers and associated passengers. I now wish to move beyond the dichotomy between the working class and the officers and focus on the role of the leader.

There could be several reasons for hiding anger. First, the people involved could want to move past it and not give it more publicity than needed. Second, and centrally, these books were written by the expedition leaders, and it was in their interest to downplay any tensions because it was their job as leaders to manage conflict during the expeditions. As Le Myre de Vilers’ speech made clear, the question of the management of the anger and tensions on an expedition reflected on its leader: if it appeared successful, it was to his honour. Expedition leaders employed rather standardised methods to keep morale up, from feasts on birthdays, Christmas and national days to sports competitions during the overwintering (McCorristine & Mocellin, 2016). This focus on managing tensions and anger as a criterion of good leadership was a break with the Hatteras model: in Verne’s book, his hero got angry several times; he also lost almost all his men before reaching the North Pole (Verne, 1867, pp. 117, 189, 355, 361, 399).

Charcot does indeed appear to have been seen, on the whole, as a good leader by his men. Rallier du Baty was very much a Charcot enthusiast; he later named a ship Jean-Baptiste Charcot. However, Rallier du Baty was not a typical seaman: From a family of navy officers, he had embarked on the expedition as a seaman only because he had not yet passed his captain’s exam. Therefore, he probably felt closer to Charcot and the officers than did the other seamen on the ship. Yet even if one excludes Rallier’s testimony, the fact that eight of the non-officers and one of the scientists on Charcot’s first Antarctic expedition joined him again on his second one a few years later (1908–1910) shows that they deemed the conditions acceptable – not just his leadership, but also the pay, and perhaps the taste of adventure.

Yet when it came to managing the various incidents of anger, Charcot did not do an impressive job. From his own account, it appears that he did not manage his own anger very well, inflicting it on others regardless of their actual role in the problems and putting himself and others at risk by venturing out on the ice alone. From Rallier’s journal, one can say that the ship, designed by Charcot specifically for a polar expedition, was not ideal for preserving individual privacy while overwintering, but the ship was not worse on this point than most others used in expeditions in that period. More problematic for Charcot was his lack of management of the situations surrounding “Z”, whose name was censored by the publisher of Rallier’s journal. Z may have been Paul Pleneau, but he most likely was Pierre Dayné, a Franco-Italian guide usually working in the Alps. Rallier did not record all his disputes with Z, but it was implicit that there had been a few when he noted on June 5, 1904, that “I have acquired the certainty that Z… harboured a violent hatred against me since the day I told him what he really was: a snitch and a good-for-nothing. What a mistake to embarrass oneself with such a nasty individual in an expedition of this kind” (Rallier du Baty, 1946, p. 116). Charcot’s leadership was being criticised here: he was the one who had chosen the crew; the mistake that Rallier denounced was Charcot’s.

Two weeks later, Rallier recorded another incident with Z, about a shovel that Z wanted to take while Rallier was using it, leading to a “violent argument” in which Rallier told Z “a lot of unpleasant things, but that I believe are deserved”. In response, Z threatened to have him “thanked” by his Italian friends when they were back in Paris – suggesting that Z was indeed the Franco-Italian Pierre Dayné. Charcot witnessed part of this altercation but did not do much: “When Z saw him, he stopped talking, so I carried on even more. M. Charcot, after having come closer, turned his back without saying anything” (Rallier du Baty, 1946, pp. 124–125). Disputes and arguments, as Charcot himself recognised in his book, were normal. To a degree, the avant and the arrière were two different emotional arenas and the seamen had some liberty to criticise the officers when they were among themselves or to argue among themselves as long as the ship’s functioning was not affected. Charcot’s semi-intervention by approaching the arguing men – thus stopping the argument from Z but not from Rallier, who felt closer to Charcot – but finally leaving without saying anything, was a poor compromise. He could have legitimately considered the situation to be an issue between two seamen, from the ship’s avant, that they would resolve without the need for someone from the arrière. Conversely, he could have deemed the situation to require such an intervention. But his half-intervention made things worse by reinforcing the exclusion of Z and emboldening Rallier.

Anger between members of the expedition could therefore be an issue, although it seems Charcot was correct in that it usually was not in the long term on this particular expedition. It could also prove positive when it was turned against outsiders to the expedition, thereby reinforcing solidarity among the crew. Such an event occurred on the ship before it reached the ice: while on the way to South America, three members of the expedition – the most senior ones – decided to leave it and return to France as soon as they reached a harbour. This was seen as a betrayal, and it evoked anger among others on the ship. Charcot himself glossed over it diplomatically in his book. Rallier du Baty, in contrast, did not. He was open about his own feelings, and he described how he perceived Charcot’s: this was the moment when he thought that he heard “rage and irony” in Charcot’s voice (Rallier du Baty, 1946, pp. 42–43). As Rallier records it, the incident led to a reinforcement of the expedition’s cohesion: “At 8 o’clock, during our evening meal, we see the commandant arrive on the avant, he seems overexcited and says to Chollet: ‘Ernest, from now on you will be in charge on one of the watches’. Then, with a voice in which rage and irony break through, Charcot continues: ‘Yes, there are three of these gentlemen who are abandoning us: something had been brewing for a long time, it has finally burst.’ Addressing himself to us: ‘I hope that none of you intends on leaving me?’ Moved by seeing Charcot distressed and abandoned, we answer: ‘Commandant, you know well that we will follow you until the end’” (Rallier du Baty, 1946, pp. 42–43). Rallier was particularly pro-Charcot, and his testimony should not be seen as valid for the rest of the avant. Whether they were all as moved as he was is impossible to know; however, none of them left the expedition. The incident shows how Charcot played on the opposition between avant and arrière: he called the three deserters messieurs, “gentlemen”, insisting on their being of the arrière and their leaving “us”. He came to the men in their own quarters rather than summoning everyone on the deck, and he did not hide his emotions from them. This mixture of visible distress and anger aimed at a common other – the officers and scientists who were not of the avant and now not of the expedition at all – worked well to unite the crew.

Le Myre de Vilers applauding Charcot for having maintained “harmony” among his men therefore seems unjustified when in fact he did not manage to keep his crew together and when there were clearly many tensions on the expedition. This celebration was possible only because these tensions were hidden from the public on the expedition’s return. Le Myre de Vilers’ speech shows that this was the appropriate way to handle things; for the expedition to be celebrated, it had to seem successful also in terms of the management of emotions. In the field, anger between peers was not inappropriate on the expedition, and neither was the anger of a superior towards his subordinates. However, when it came to narrating the story, these bouts of anger were omitted.

Conclusion

The emotions of explorers were both an essential aspect of life during an expedition and a preoccupation of the journalists back home, for whom those emotions were no more accessible than for the historian. As such, studying the emotions of polar exploration and the discourses surrounding them allows us to better understand not only life on an expedition and the society that sent and received these expeditions but it also enables us to move past the expedition leaders’ own presentation of events. As Ben Maddison reminds us, the heroization of the higher- and middle-class Antarctic explorers, officers and scientists built upon their work, which depended on working-class men who did not benefit from this heroization and have largely left no direct trace (Maddison, 2017). Worse, their contributions and their attitudes were masked in the writings of explorers like Charcot, hiding some of the realities of their life on the expedition to better put forward his own experience, including the emotions experienced. The publishers of Rallier du Baty’s journal named the book, tellingly, In the Shadow of Charcot.

The case of Charcot’s first expedition is not a particularly favourable one for the study of the history of emotions, owing to the scarcity of sources. Yet I have shown in this article that it is possible to gain a better understanding of the emotions of polar exploration than one gets from only the expedition leader’s account. As I have shown, fear and anger occupied a position in his book that was often at odds with their actual place on the expedition. One can only wonder what an expedition where the participants were encouraged to focus on their fears would have looked like; it is hard to see how it could have been an advantage. Yet, it was what the explorers were expected to do when they told the story. Emotions are not the only aspect of a polar expedition that can be modified for publication, but it is particularly easy to do it: inventing an island or lying about the journey would usually be found out by later expeditions, but emotions seldom left other traces that could be checked. They were therefore particularly susceptible to being dominated by the explorer’s own view or what was in his interest to show after returning – for instance, downplaying anger as a way of showing good leadership, or emphasising fear to boost publication sales.